Adoptions and Rejections of the Religious Revolution vis-à-vis Secular Modernity (Formulating Ayatollah Khamenei’s Analytical Position on West)

Jamshidi, Mahdi

doi:10.22034/irsj.2026.243511

Adoptions and Rejections of the Religious Revolution vis-à-vis Secular Modernity (Formulating Ayatollah Khamenei’s Analytical Position on West)

Document Type : Original Article

Author

mahdi jamshidi

Assistant Professor, Cultural Studies Department, Institute of Culture and Social Studies, Institute of Islamic Culture and Thought, Tehran, Iran.

10.22034/irsj.2026.243511

Abstract

This article seeks to frame and interpret Ayatollah Khamenei’s views and theories concerning the theoretical and practical relationship between the world of the Islamic Revolution and the world of modernity. To address this issue, the study first examines his approach to the nature of the Revolution and the nature of modernity, arguing that these two objective and historical realities reflect two distinct types of rationality and two different worlds that are fundamentally incompatible. It further contends that the Iranian Revolution embodies an orientation antithetical to the teleological ends of modernity. In the second section, the article discusses Ayatollah Khamenei’s selective and decompositional engagement with modernity, specifying both the possibility and the limits of appropriation. In this part of the study, three domains are distinguished: modern culture, which is characterized as a manifestation of contemporary jahiliyyah (ignorance); modern natural sciences, where the principal issue is the removal of domination; and modern human sciences, which, due to the embeddedness of values within them, are regarded as possessing fundamental and essential ruptures with the Islamic worldview. In the final section, the theory of “negative guardianship” (velayat-e manfi) is examined, demonstrating that Ayatollah Khamenei’s West-analytical perspective entails a clear demarcation from modernity and an avoidance of mixture and assimilation. The article employs a method of theoretical and logical textual analysis, articulating the epistemic themes in order to structure and narrate Ayatollah Khamenei’s approach to the West.

Keywords

Western modernity

Islamic Revolution

Ayatollah Khamenei

Culture

Human sciences

Negative guardianship